


Prologue

by EnderBerlyn



Series: On Hunting [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Curtain Fic, Novel, Prologue
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-17
Updated: 2017-04-17
Packaged: 2018-10-19 22:18:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 730
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10649187
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EnderBerlyn/pseuds/EnderBerlyn
Summary: Prologue to Sam Winchester's On Hunting





	Prologue

In 2018, I joined a rock-and-roll band composed mostly of hunters. The Rock Bottom Renegades were the brainchild of Claire Novak, a hunter from Illinois. The group consists of Krissy Chambers on lead guitar, Donna Hanscum on bass, Jody Mills on keyboards, Garth Fitzgerald IV on mandolin, and my brother, Dean, on rhythm guitar. Claire is on vocals and sounds a little like that girl from The Pretty Reckless. It was established early on that I couldn’t sing for shit, so I was given the tambourine. Unfortunately, I got a little carried away during a show and broke it. I’ve since been relegated to the cowbell, but I perform the hell out of it. Gene Frenkle would be proud. Dean’s actually gotten pretty good at the guitar, too.

The group started up not too long after the Darkness spread across the planet and a spotlight was shone on the supernatural. It was intended to be a one-shot deal – we would play two shows at the roadhouse not too far up the road from the bunker, get a few laughs, imagine what it would be like to be normal for a few hours, and then go our separate ways. 

It didn’t happen that way, because we never quite split up. We discovered we liked playing together too much to quit, and with a couple of stand-ins on drums or sax, we actually sounded pretty good. People paid to hear us. Not a lot, not Pearl Jam or Foo Fighters prices, but enough that they could get a decent look at the rag-tag bunch that saved the world (I think some people may have paid for that experience more than the actual music). 

We do it for the music, but we also do it for the companionship. We like each other, and we like having the chance to get together and talk about the real job, the job people are always telling us to quit and silently praying we don’t. 

One night while we were eating Chinese takeout before a gig in Sioux Falls, I asked Jody if there was ever any one question she never got asked when people found out what she did for a ‘living’ – that question you never get to answer when you’re standing in front of some hunter-struck fans and pretending you don’t put your pants on one leg at a time just like everybody else. Jodi paused, thinking about it for a moment, and then said: “No one ever asks about the journey.” 

I owe an immense debt of gratitude to her for saying that. I had been toying with the concept of writing a short book about hunting for over a year at that time, but I hadn’t pulled the trigger because I didn’t trust my own motivations – why did I want to write about hunting? What made me think I had anything at all worth saying?

The easy answer is that someone who has killed as many monsters as I have must have something worthwhile to say about doing it, but the easy answer isn’t often the truth, especially in this line of work. Ronald McDonald sold a hell of a lot of hamburgers, but I’m pretty sure no one wants to know how he made them. If I was going to be presumptuous enough to tell people how to hunt, I felt there had to be a better reason than my record of success. To put it another way, I didn’t want to write a book, even one as short as this, if it left me sounding like an arrogant asshole or a transcendental dickbag. 

But Jodi was right: nobody ever asks about the journey. They ask about how we got into the life and our biggest kills, but they don’t ask about the road we took between the two. Yet many of us hunters care deeply about the journey, in our own humble ways, and care passionately about the art and craft of transforming ourselves into better weapons, both physically and mentally. What follows is an attempt to put down, briefly and simply, how I came to the life, what I know about it now, and how it’s done. It’s about the day job; it’s about the journey.

This book is dedicated to Jody Mills, who told me in a very simple and direct way that it was okay to write it.

**Author's Note:**

> I read Stephen King's On Writing and couldn't help imagining what it would be like if Sam had written it. Then this happened.
> 
> Not my characters, not for profit, and mostly not even my ideas. Just my re-work of Stephen King's book in a Supernatural universe.


End file.
